Watch Out For These………

As you put together your Customer Experience plans for 2014, whether you’re beginning the journey or well along the way, make sure to avoid these 10 common mistakes

1. Faking executive commitment. It’s very easy for an executive to say that he or she is committed to customer experience, but it takes much more than words to drive sustainable change across an organization.

2. Over-relying on customer surveys. Asking a barrage of multiple choice questions to customers might have made sense five years ago, but it’s an ineffective use of a key asset, customer feedback.

3. Neglecting experience design. Companies focus on the basic requirements of an interaction but ignore the elements of design that can make the difference between customer anger and customer delight.

4. Treating all customers the same. Customers have different needs, interests, and familiarity with offerings, but companies often turn their backs on these differences. While it may sound appealing to deliver a great experience to everyone, it’s an impractical goal for most companies.

5. Un-engaging new customers. Companies work very hard to get new customers, but they often ignore them after they write their first check.

6. Ignoring employees. Not surprisingly, customer experience programs focus on customers. But they often don’t spend enough time cultivating one of their most important CX assets: employees.

7. Obsessing about detractors. Customer experience programs often focus mostly on fixing problems so that customers won’t dislike the company, but they don’t spend enough time figuring out how to make customers love them.

8. Forgetting to celebrate success. Customer experience leaders spend so much energy focusing on what needs to be improved that they often forget to appreciate the progress that has already been made.

9. Falling in love with a metric. Companies often get hooked on a metric like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and lose sight of what’s really important: making improvements.